Improving the memory management performance of RTSJ
M. Teresa Higuera‐Toledano, Valérie Issarny · Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience · 2005
Abstract From a real‐time perspective, the garbage collector (GC) introduces unpredictable pauses that are not tolerated by real‐time tasks. Real‐time collectors eliminate this problem but introduce a high overhead. Another approach is to use memory regions (MRs) within which allocation and deallocation is customized. This facility is supported by the memory model of the Real‐Time Specification for Java (RTSJ). RTSJ imposes strict access and assignment rules to avoid both the dangling inter‐region references and the delays of critical tasks of the GC. A dynamic check solution can incur high overhead, which can be reduced by taking advantage of hardware features. This paper provides an in‐depth analytical investigation of the overhead introduced by dynamic assignments checks in RTSJ, describing and analysing several solutions to reduce the introduced overhead. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.